Sex Work in Colonial Egypt

From 1798 to 1801, during the French Expedition to Egypt, Baron Dominique Vivant Denon was in charge of Napoleon Bonaparte's archaeological mission: his duty was that of documenting Egyptian historical heritage. In 1802 he published a travelogue, Voyage dans la basse et la haute Égypte pendante les campagnes de general Bonaparte, where the detailed narration of his fieldtrips was accompanied by a series of beautifully engraved plates.¹ As the French troops took physical possession of Egypt, Vivant Denon appropriated the country's history by incorporating the scattered remains of a glorious, distant past into a historical trajectory that connected the most durable form of rule in human history with contemporary imperial France. A different type of colonisation took place, what we may call an epistemic one, whereby the material and intellectual resources of the West were deployed to secure its monopoly over the representation of the Orient.

In his travelogue, Vivant Denon did not only draw ruins and temples, palms and exotic landscapes; some plates represent images of Egyptian people and everyday life scenes. Among them, table XXXV (Figure I.1) caught my attention.² It shows an Egyptian woman, ‘a female native, married to a Franc’, Vivant Denon tells us in the caption. This picture is striking for many reasons: primarily, and paradoxically, for its being just so ordinary. Firmly placed within an orientalist figurative canon, Vivant Denon's lady is identical to many other Middle Eastern women sketched by Western painters like Ingres, Delacroix and their epigones. Aloof, inattentive and stretched languidly on a carpet, with her staring gaze she is almost expressionless as she is ‘captured’ by the artist's charcoal. Something in her pose seems to betray a certain indolence, a sense of laxity that pervades so many nineteenth-century depictions of the Orient, with their ubiquitous scenes of languid eunuchs and women in harims and dimly lit hammams. Once and again, Vivant Denon is representing an idea, not a real woman; once and again this lady is a stereotype, her image the product of multiple gender, race and class-based power relations, which allow a white bourgeois man to represent – or just imagine – this woman.³ Yet, in this case it appears that the portrait originated from an actual encounter, and my interest in the picture also stems from that little piece of information that the author purposely gave us in the caption. Fond of her master, yet unable to restrain her erotic drive, the Egyptian woman – married to Vivant Denon's neighbour – was, he tells us, not

amiable enough to love him alone; his jealousy was the cause of continual noisy quarrels; on her submission, she constantly promised to renounce the object of his jealousy; but the next day there was new affliction; she would weep, and repent again; still, her husband had always some fresh cause for scolding.⁴

fig-I-1

Figure I.1 Native lady married to a Franc, Vivant Denon (1803), Vol. 1, Table XXXV.

The epilogue of such a moral tale was intentionally tragic: when the plague broke out in Rosetta, the couple's hometown, the woman contracted the disease from one of her lovers and passed it on to her husband, who died an innocent victim of his wife's licentiousness. This Egyptian lady therefore seemed to fatally embody all the potential disasters awaiting those who fell prey to the lethal, erotic temptations of the ‘Orient’.

Beyond the essentialist construction of the woman's thoroughly gendered and racialised body, I was struck by the utter lack of any explanation or presumption offered by Vivant Denon for her promiscuity, other than that of a ‘typically Oriental’, unrestrained sexual appetite. For example, no mention is made of the fact that, at the time of the French Expedition, a number of local women entered into multiple transactional sexual liaisons with French men who they took as their ‘sugar daddies’ in order to improve their economic circumstances.⁵ The Egyptian historian al-Jabarti (1754–1825) wrote that when the French came to Egypt, ‘loose women and prostitutes of low breeding became attached to the French and mixed with them because of their submission to women as well as their liberality with them’.⁶ From a later account by Carlos Bey, nom de plume of a British army officer who witnessed the flight of the French from Egypt in 1802, we learn that a vast number of Egyptian women ‘lived with the French soldiers and almost invariably destroyed by medicine before birth the creatures that would otherwise have seen the light, but would have been the children of Christians’.⁷ Colonisers and colonised alike clearly talked of ‘transgressive’ female sexuality and interracial sexual relations as a way to express fears of subversion of the political and social order. Al-Jabarti, for instance, argued that

because of the advantages offered by the French, these women renounced all sense of shame and self-respect, all deference to public opinion. And they enticed females of their like, particularly young girls, bewitching their minds and exploiting the penchant to sin characteristic of human nature.

When the black slave girls, he went on, ‘learned about the interest of the French in loose women […] they jumped over the walls and escaped to them through windows and informed them of the secrets of their masters and of their hidden treasures, concealed properties and so forth’.⁸ Upon their return to France, French port officials at Rosetta sold their native women to British soldiers for one dollar each. Carlos Bey commented that ‘in truth it was more of a transfer than a real sale, so that these women could find shelter from Turkish vengeance, since laws were passed calling for the execution of all native women that had intermingled with the foreigners’.⁹ Some gruesome cases of execution are reported by al-Jabarti.¹⁰ Fortunately, though, not all women were doomed to a tragic fate. Many went back to their previous husbands, or returned to their families and were eventually married off: in short, they reintegrated into their native society.

These stories, albeit anecdotal, were invaluable in providing me with a point of entry into the main themes of this book, that is, the social construction of transgressive sexualities in modern Egypt and, more pointedly, the making of a specifically gendered subjectivity, the prostitute's, as a site of modern biopolitical governmentality.

In pre-modern Egypt, profiles of women carrying out morally ‘dubious activities’ such as public dancing and singing, the so-called ghawazi, communal dancers and singers of sometimes alleged Gypsy origin, can often be encountered in orientalist travelogues: here they were juxtaposed to other conventional images of the ‘Oriental feminine’, that of the heavily veiled women, impervious to the Western gaze.¹¹ Alongside other working-class women of casual or indefinite occupation, communal performers occupied a sort of grey zone, and increasingly fell under the scrutiny of the authorities as they were ‘known’ (mashhurat) for providing sexual services outside the wedlock on a more or less regular basis, as a way to survive. The occupational status of women selling sex in pre-colonial Cairo is a pretty elusive topic for historians.¹² The combination of ephemeral documentation and literary descriptions can sketch but the contours of this type of activity, and only to a certain extent. Whether these women were described as dangerous and sly, or passive and subservient, the transactional and contractual dimensions of their work are generally concealed behind highly eroticised descriptions. French writer Gustave Flaubert, for example, gives no background information about the presence of the ‘Triestina’, an Italian prostitute he encountered in a Cairene, ‘dilapidated’ brothel room during his authentic Middle Eastern sex tour in 1850.¹³ In the same way, Kutchuk Hanem, the Syrian ‘alimah Flaubert met in Esna, may once have been one of the most renowned courtesans of her times, but we are not told anything about the circumstances that brought her to practise prostitution in a dull and languid provincial town: once again, voyeuristic descriptions of firm bronze breasts and sexual intercourse are all we are left with.¹⁴ Towards the end of the nineteenth century, by contrast, sex work stood out as a manifest, exposed feature of a rapidly changing urban space. In the streets of red-light districts such as Cairo's Wass‘ah or Wagh el-Birkah, professional prostitutes plied the trade under the public eye. In his masterpiece The Cairo Trilogy, Naguib Mahfuz, for example, describes a stroll in the area in terms of a spectacle:

The men swivelled their heads from right to left at prostitutes who stood or sat on either side. From faces veiled by brilliant make-up, eyes glanced around with a seductive look of welcome. At every instant, a man would break ranks to approach one of the women. She would follow him inside, the alluring look in her eyes replaced by a serious, businesslike expression. Lamps mounted above the doors of the brothels and the coffee-houses gave off a brilliant light in which accumulated the clouds of smoke rising from the incense burners and the water pipes. Voices were blended and intermingled in a tumultuous swirl around which eddied laughter, shouts, the squeaking of doors and windows, piano and accordion music, rollicking handclaps, a policeman's bark, braying, grunts, coughs of hashish addicts and screams of drunkards, anonymous calls for help, raps of a stick, and singing by individuals and groups […] Every beautiful woman there was available and would generously reveal her beauty and secrets in exchange for only ten piasters.¹⁵

These accounts give evidence of a stark contrast between the elusiveness of transactional sex in pre-colonial Egypt – as suggested by the story of the Frenchman's Egyptian wife this book starts with – and its manifestations in colonial times, when sex work became an evident feature of the new modern city, and women selling sex tended to be seen by the general public as a specific ‘type’ of women, that is, defined by the peculiar kind of commercial and promiscuous sex they were engaged in. This begs for a discussion of the political rationality behind this momentuous change: how to make sense of this macroscopic transformation?

On one side, the change was quantitative and structural: sex work expansion, that is, the increase in the number of women selling sex, was triggered by the integration of Egypt's economy in the world market; by the rural crisis; by migration, both domestic and international; and by the instability of women's economic roles in a period of sweeping economic change. As occupational prospects for women outside the family economy were limited or poorly paid, a growing number of women turned to sex work as a coping strategy for themselves and, often, for their families. On the other side, the transformation was also qualitative, as sex work, now commodified and fetishised, was placed at the centre of competing discourses about social regulation. Gender and sex became critical areas for hegemonic intervention within the frame of an emerging modernist biopolitical governmentality in Egypt. The new paramount importance of biopolitics, a distinct marker of modern governmentality, in Cairo as elsewhere resulted in the introduction of a complex, albeit largely ineffective, system of sex work regulation starting in 1882. Women selling sex thus turned into ‘prostitutes’ as part of larger projects of societal control. Moreover, a whole host of discourses on prostitution, and its dangers for both the Empire and the Egyptian nation, started to proliferate.

By tracing the transformation of gendered economic roles and mobility in the rapidly changing urban environment of fin-de-siècle Cairo, this book tells the story of how subaltern women selling sex as a survival strategy were increasingly turned – by both colonial and local authorities – into objects of control, through a range of disciplinary practices which, I argue, made for a quite extensive, though ultimately flawed, biopolitical apparatus. In order to do this, I take into account the whole trajectory from the beginning of prostitution regulation in 1882 to its eventual abolition in 1949, so as to understand the dissemination of modern biopolitical governmentality in Egypt. The book thus engages in a critique of modernity and of the biopolitical as a distinctive feature of modern power, and the role prostitution plays in this process. More pointedly, I argue that prostitution regulation in Cairo constituted a peculiar biopolitical regime, whose meaning can be better understood at the junction between imperial concerns for public hygiene, military welfare, migration, public order and local nationalist politics. Women engaging in sex for money were increasingly subjected to forms of control, often based on their ethnicity, but they did not passively undergo this system of regulation. The book therefore also tells a story, necessarily fragmentary but nonetheless substantial, of how these women inhabited these disciplinary practices, submitting to them, escaping them and manipulating them, in order to achieve their material goals.

This study aims to elucidate the inextricable link between facts, discourses and historical narratives about sex work in the Egyptian colonial period, in order to understand how colonial and nationalist anxieties – fears of social disorder, racial degeneration, imperial decadence, national crisis – were inscribed in the bodies of women considered sexually transgressive. A similar deconstruction of hegemonic representations of sex workers’ dangerousness for the political and civic order is premised on some theoretical reflections. Non-economistic, culturalist Marxism and feminism initially sparked my interest in the examination of a type of gendered subalternity, whose story had long been excluded from the historical record. While subscribing to the view according to which there is much to know outside historical grand narratives, critical reconsiderations of the rather fixed notion of ‘social margins’ and ‘dangerous classes’ as postulated by orthodox ‘history from below’, prompted by the so-called ‘culturalist turn’, significantly impacted my understanding of social marginality.¹⁶ I not only conceptualise it as a shifting, positional and productive construct; I see the construction, and normalisation, of marginal positions and subjectivities through disciplinary projects of various types as constitutive of hegemonic power structures. Marginality and hegemony are therefore interdependent and produced by the same generative process.¹⁷ A similar process, and the resulting forms of governmentality, constituted a salient feature of Western modernity. The unprecedented stigmatisation of non-conformity to newly imposed norms of social behaviour was key to this process: idlers, vagrants, lunatics, homosexuals and prostitutes, all those deviating from bourgeois conventions were morphed into targets of power supervision and repression through the creation of specific institutions and normative discourses.¹⁸ Modern disciplinary practices replaced medieval marginalisation rituals: if in earlier times lepers were excluded from the human consortium tout court, modern plague victims were carefully contained, monitored and subjected to a regime of power based on supervision.¹⁹ Shifting away from the concept of power as a simple polarisation between coercion and consensus, repressive technologies of domination were paired with productive technologies of self-cultivation. Power was thus conceptualised as the capacity to control, regulate and expand the productive capacities of the individual and collective body: in short, a biopolitical type of power characterised by a new interventionist, transformative thrust upon reality. As Timothy Mitchell put it, modernity meant the ‘spread of a new political order that inscribes in the social world a new conception of space, new forms of personhood, and a new meaning of manufacturing the experience of the real’.²⁰ Sex work represented then a particularly sensible biopolitical issue. Firstly, it implied the use of the body for sexual practices intentionally disconnected from their reproductive potential within the family, even if, as I will show, in many cases it was not external to the reproduction of household economies. Secondly, the danger of venereal contagion that was attributed to the prostitute's body, as amply illustrated by a rapidly expanding genre of scientific or pseudoscientific medical literature on public health and epidemiology, carried the risk of annihilating the entire social body. Sex therefore constituted an important medium for the articulation of normative ideas about social control, deeply classed, gendered and racialised at once.

A first aim of this research is to explore the relationship between the construction of social marginality and biopolitics by looking at a specific case study: the regulation, and subsequent abolition, of sex work in colonial and semi-colonial Cairo, and its unique positioning at the croassroads between imperial and nationalist forms of governmentality. In doing this I clearly engage in a conversation with a very rich corpus of revisionist, historical essays on sex work.²¹ As Timothy Gilfoyle aptly remarked, one major shift in the historiography of prostitution was that of historicising sex work, which showed how modern prostitution can't be understood separately from disciplinary and subjectification processes. Far from being the ‘world's oldest profession’, prostitution has a precise historical genealogy which goes hand in hand with the transformation of forms of governmentality and political rationalities. Previous works have called into question the conventional incorporation of prostitution analysis into broader narratives of crime and deviancy, thus exposing the constructed nature of sex workers' scapegoating as an integral part of the production of the national order, and the imperial one as an extension of this order.²² My research thus fits within a global history of modern prostitution, as it places the transformation of sex work in the midst of sweeping economic globalisation, modernisation of the urban space, and modern forms of political rule and social control.²³ The heightened vulnerability of female economic roles in the transition from ‘traditional’ to market-oriented and increasingly globalised economies turned sex into a type of labour which growing numbers of women worldwide could easily mobilise as a means of subsistence (like men, although the main focus of my research is female prostitution). Egyptian cities were no exception to this process. The expansion of sex work in Cairo was part and parcel of a global modernity characterised by the extension of capitalist relations of labour, production and consumption; the diffusion of new forms of political power and social order; novel conceptions of subjectivity and individual agency; unprecedented urban change; and increased mobility of people and commodities. Under Muhammad ʿAli's rule (1805–1848), Egyptian sex work was disciplined by on and off fiscal supervision and temporary confinement of sex workers to provincial areas; these measures were already dictated by nascent biopolitical concerns, and constituted vital parts of the wali's project of defensive modernisation. Yet, no coherent disciplinary apparatus was in place before the British occupied Egypt in 1882. Just 15 days after the British Army invaded Egypt, a manshur ‘amm (general decree) on prostitution was promulgated. This act constitutes both a point of departure and arrival in the historical narrative presented here. It is an arrival point because the system of regulation brought in by the British had historical local antecedents, as mentioned earlier; it is a point of departure because it marks the advent of a full-fledged biopolitical project whose imperialist connotations and nationalist implications were not lost on the local political elites. The manshur ‛amm of 1882, in fact, can be understood as a product of coloniality; as a distinctively modern type of political rationale aimed at enhancing the productivity of the population through the regulation of their biological collective processes; and a product of colonialism, that is, a historically and geographically specific example of British colonial policy.²⁴

The colonial modernity of sex work regulation in Cairo was also evident in its relation with the global market and urban space, thus presenting itself as the emerging setting of a world economy. The expansion of sex work in Cairo, in fact, brought together the local and the global, the rural and the urban; after 1882, and especially during the investment boom of 1897–1907, the city's colonial economy attracted thousands of subsistence migrants, both domestic and international, in addition to a class of foreign expats, businessmen, speculators and imperial administrators. Hence, mobility and migration represent an important part of the historical narrative presented here. New forms of female mobility, especially when they did not involve male supervision, haunted the new Cairene urban space according to the dominant, elite imagination. Migrants, in general, and women migrants in particular, aroused biopolitical anxieties, thus calling for specific forms of supervision and control often based on racial distinctions.

Between the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, girls and women coming from economically depressed rural areas of Egypt and Europe alike (especially the south of France, Greece, Italy, Poland and Russia) moved to Cairo in search of an occupation. Sex work featured prominently among their professional options. In colonial Cairo, sex became a decidedly multiethnic trade, whereby local and foreign practitioners shared similar sociological profiles, motivations and aims, but were subjected to different working arrangements conspicuously defined by their racial profile. While Capitulary legislation shielded foreign prostitutes from unwanted state intervention, local ones were the target of the most intrusive aspect of regulation, which took the form of sanitary supervision. On the one hand, such a legal ‘double standard’ limited the effectiveness of regulationism, and seemed to threaten the imperial order by failing to contrast the spread of venereal disease among the occupational army, and to secure the public order; on the other hand, ongoing disciplinary efforts were instrumental in the consolidation of the racial fiction on which the entire imperial enterprise was based. Such imaginary hierarchies were simultaneously created and contested by the mutually constitutive relationship between disciplinary apparatuses and everday practices of evasion from below. In this sense, prostitution and its regulation were absolutely integral to the production of the colonial order in Cairo. Both local and foreign sex workers were represented by colonial and local authorities as a major metaphor of social unrest, a serious threat to imperial domination and political legitimacy on one side, and to the physical and moral welfare of the rising Egyptian nation on the other. Until World War I, regulationism was considered vital for the preservation of the military capacity and physical health of imperial troops that were dislocated in the Empire, and thus of the racial order. The shift from regulationism to abolitionism, which in Cairo started with the Purification Campaign of 1915–16, can be seen as the product of multiple negotiations between colonial authorities, imperial and international social reformers and local nationalist elites. The definition and regulation of normative and heteronormative, gendered roles and sexualities became, especially after Egypt's formal independence in 1922, nodal points in the making of the nationalist project for both secular and religious local elites.

The centrality of sex and gender in the articulation of an imagined homogeneous, national community and nationalist discourse, nonetheless, was far from being purely derivative: on the contrary, I argue that it stands as an example of how exogenous cultural materials (namely a paternalistic discourse of humanitarian intervention and reformation with mature, biopolitical concerns) were manipulated and rearticulated into a locally inflected abolitionist idiom. Broadly speaking, my contribution to such a vast comparative approach entailed the in-depth exploration of a non-metropolitan context that has not yet been studied extensively, as a way to bridge the seemingly entrenched dichotomy between structural, systemic analysis and close areal readings. Colonial and semi-colonial Egypt after 1922 seemed to me a fascinating case study for pushing the boundaries of Foucaldian governmentality theory beyond its Eurocentric focus and homeostatic tendency.²⁵ The colony was a laboratory where imperial disciplinary strategies were tested and contested, interiorised, then manipulated and rearticualed by local hegemonic groups and ordinary people in the formulation of their own types of vernacular modernity.²⁶ With its subtle and complex interplay between a colonial power and a formally sovereign, yet de facto externally controlled, local form of rule, its emerging modernist, nationalist movement and the problems arising from the existence of large numbers of non-local subjects protected by Capitulary legislation, Egypt offered an interesting example of the provincialisation of sex work regulation as a facet of typically Western governmentality and its imagined order. The issue of the circulation of cultural materials between the metropolis and the colony, and indeed the question of the mutual constitution of the European self and the colonial Other, is thus central to my research.

Post-culturalist historiographies of sex work have de-essentialised prostitution by deconstructing hegemonic discourses and symbolic formations, thus showing how the stigmatisation or pathologicisation of sex work in public discourse was historically and culturally constructed. Framing prostitution within different processes of state- and nation-building thus meant, on one side, the working through of multiple dominant discourses: on the other, it also meant – as other seminal works have done more emphatically – the taking into consideration of prostitutes’ sociological profiles, daily lives and survival strategies. The analysis of prostitution in the context of coeval job markets and working-class culture implied a shift from the idea of prostitution as abnormal, dangerous or unmentionably seductive, to that of prostitution as something ordinary and banal.²⁷ However, according to Luise White, author of a radical materialist history of sex work in colonial Nairobi, the failure to formulate a forward critique of their sources' positionality led most of these works to reinforce, if unintentionally, the analytical categories through which prostitution had been made sense of and controlled: exploitation, sickness and poverty. By asking the fundamental question of how a corpus of literature on sex work can speak only of women's victimisation and passivity, instead of women's earnings, White explored the relationship between patterns of economic change, urbanisation and sex work in its various forms. With the aim of writing ‘a history of prostitution without isolating women in the categories of deviancy and subculture’,²⁸ she established a link between the dislocation of agricultural and pastoral economies and the expansion of sex work, a successful strategy available to women who sought to accumulate resources, either for the reconstitution of their families' shattered finances or in order to invest in urban estate properties.

For all the importance of trying to scrutinise agency beyond discourse, I subscribe to the view that materiality and discourses cannot be known and studied separately. Hence, I aim to complement the corpus of prostitution studies that focusses on the agency of sex workers, based on the premises that hegemony is never monolithic and that the exploration of subaltern lives does irremediably substantiate a space of complex and fragmented micro-resistances. At the same time, the way in which these forms of micro-resistance can be known and made sense of is open to scrutiny. In particular, the limit imposed by the type of sources available to the historian must be acknowledged and conceptually explored.²⁹

My work has been heavily influenced by Gail Hershatter's methodological claims about history writing as a meta-discourse, and her critique of ‘history as retrieval’ methodology.³⁰ I agree on the fact that material and ideological changes cannot and should not be examined separately, as if social change was in essence pre-discursive. Neither can social change, Hershatter warns, ‘be regarded as determinative in the last instance of the conditions of the prostitutes' lives in a mechanistic and predetermined way’.³¹ I will therefore combine materialist bottom-up and discursive top-down approaches, while remaining aware of the inherent, unsolvable – but, I believe, productive – contradictions between the two approaches. As it has been noted in reference to some important developments in the epistemological trajectory of the Subaltern Studies collective, including its shift to post-structuralism,³² although it assigns an important role to non-elite agency, discursive methodology – if pushed to the extreme – can cause any subaltern subjectivity, as fragmented and multiple as it may be, to drop out of focus. Yet, in colonial Cairo real flesh-and-blood women, under a multitude of arrangements and with different motivations, sold their sexual services; within the interstices of discourses about social decay and venereal peril, the dangers of Westernisation and moral crisis, women were trying to improve their working conditions and living circumstances.

Prostitutes, like other people of humble origins or illiterates, rarely recorded their life experiences or left firsthand accounts of their circumstances: they were mostly written about. Marilyn Booth, who has worked extensively on fictional first-person narratives by memoirists of ‘fallenness’, rightly speaks of this genre as an exercise in ventriloquism. Thus elite men ‘spoke’ for the subaltern and the feminine as part of a precise project of nationalist pedagogy. Some of these accounts did not resort to the rhetoric device of fictional female authorship: rather, from the point of view of a subaltern observer they presented to the

voyeuristic reader, a journey into the underworld, the low-life sites of Cairo's urban fabric, from the gambling dens of Rawd el Farag to houseboat brothels on the Nile, and from the opulent facades harboring illicit sex on the boulevard Wishsh al-Birkah to the hashish dens behind al-Azhar mosque.³³

Muhammad Ahmad Yusuf's Yawmiyyat saqita (Diaries of a fallen woman, 1927) and Muhammad Ra'fat Jamali's Mudhakkirat Baghi (Memoirs of a prostitute, 1922), instead, made explicit reference to their male authorship, a typical flâneur, enhancing the plausibility of his social commentary by inserting fictional entries from prostitutes' diaries. Female pseudo-memories written in the first person, lastly, claimed to convey the unmediated point of view of women in distress, who roamed the public space: they functioned as powerful cautionary tales of social unrest.

Given that registration lists containing quantitative data on sex workers' names, ages, previous occupations, family background, civil status and so on are not retrievable in the case of Cairo, biographical information must be sought in a different way, most notably through the combination of heterogeneous sources: these include governmental reports, judicial proceedings, police investigations, documents produced by benevolent societies and the press. Indeed, information about prostitutes' social profiles or firsthand testimonies by prostitutes must be extrapolated from documents of different types, which have been written by others and often in a heavily standardised, bureaucratic language. Yet, sources like court cases and police minutes can prove productive when trying to locate, within the interstices of a dominant normative discourse, instances of a prostitute's point of view and perception. I believe that an exploration of the lives of women who lived and sold sex in Cairo offers a reading of prostitution that complicates the language of victimisation and passivity, which has been uncritically adopted for a very long time, and in doing so illuminates possible sites of women's agency. It is nevertheless important to reflect on how such agency must be understood, and especially on the extent to which the subaltern women's agentive activities can be disentangled from the dominant discourses in which they are encapsulated. As Hershatter has argued, the search for subaltern agency is, in essence, somewhat quixotic:³⁴ the risk of plunging deep into the ‘romance of resistance’, to quote Lila Abu Lughod,³⁵ is ever-present. Prostitutes' actions, circumstances, possibly also their perceptions, were paradoxically shaped by, and shaping, hegemonic power. Historians cannot but work them out from sources written from highly patronising positions. When we are able to locate prostitutes' voices, as for example in court cases, these are of course also heavily mediated. Historians do not necessarily serve these subjects well when putting them on a sort of pedestal, comprised of a kind of political agency we actually cannot know in full.³⁶ Still, for all its limits I am convinced that the exploration of the scattered evidences telling us how disadvantaged women coped with legal, moral and social systems of patriarchal subordination can yield important information on the ways in which marginality and hegemony actually interacted in complex ways.

I located a number of consular court cases related to pimping and other crimes, where prostitutes figure as plaintiffs, defendants or witnesses. These cases concerned offenders of foreign nationalities, who were subjected to their national penal code because of extra-territorial rights granted by the Capitulations. Nonetheless, the proceedings also feature local subjects, and what we then encounter in these sources is a wide range of everyday interactions between subaltern local and foreign subjects who seem to share, to a very large extent, the same lifestyles and values, chiefly the exact same concern for subsistence. Foreign prostitutes who appeared in these cases described a working environment they shared with native ones. Although they undoubtedly articulated stories of exploitation and deprivation, they did not represent themselves simply as victims, but as working women strenuously trying to defend their role as breadwinners, whether for themselves or for their families. The availability and positionality of the sources that were at my disposition constrained my analysis. The most easily accessible sources, primarily reformist papers and consular court records, were concerned more with the activities of ‘poor whites’ than with indigenous women. I have retained these categories – which I derived from colonial sources – for descriptive purposes, especially with regard to the functioning of the system of regulation (which greatly discriminated between Egyptian and foreign sex workers), but this certainly requires some further explanation. The dichotomy between ‘native’ and ‘European’, which is so pervasive in hegemonic accounts, seemed misleading to me, not only because the circumstances of European and native prostitutes were determined by class and the social construction of gender, more than by race, but above all because the very same category of ‘European’ in Cairo's colonial context is questionable.³⁷ As recent scholarship on migrant communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century has posited,³⁸ Maltese, Italian, Greek, French and other ‘subsistence migrants’ (or ‘white marginals’) in the colony, who played a very important role in Cairo's political economy of prostitution, hardly fit the normative description of ‘European’ civilisational superiority, and were considered only marginally European. As for the use of the term ‘sex worker’, here it is used mainly as counterpoint to the legal category of ‘prostitute’ and the taxonomyc concerns of regulationism. It refers to a type of activity performed by women who sell sex as their main or prevalent way of supporting themselves and those dependent on them outside of the system of regulation. Although in today's postmodern usage the term is laden with an agentive potential, and deeply imbued with political claims to decriminalisation, social protection and labour rights, I believe the term can be used in historical contexts as a way of acknowledging the economic potential of sexual trade for disadvantaged women, whithout anachronistically projecting on to them a sort of class and political consciousness they did not possess.³⁹ I am not implying, though, that any type of labour equals agency: I argue that for most of the women whose stories appear in this book, commercial sex was a tactic, a form of labour they engaged with while hoping for better opportunities, either in the form of a salaried job, a husband or a profligate lover. Other expressions, such as ‘women selling sex’ or ‘engaging in commercial sex’, could and are, in fact, applied with the purpose of going beyond the labelling implicit in the uncritical use of the term ‘prostitute’. As the process of constructing the prostitutional category is unravelled throughout the book, it becomes clear how multiple and diversified the social profiles and working arrangements of women grouped under this description were. Sex work was constituted by the different material conditions in which this labour took place as much as by the meanings and the imaginative repertoire mobilised by the term ‘prostitution’: ideas of social decay, disorder, threat and violence. In the interstices of historically constructed discourses about victimisation and passivity, empowerment and agency, ordinary women have been selling sex simply as a way to survive and make ends meet. To acknowledge that what they did was indeed a form of labour, without isolating them because of the lack of resistant or emancipatory movements, allows us to avoid obliterating their historical actions, even if these were motivated by the sheer need for subsistence.

Chapter 1 deals with the emergence of modern prostitution in late nineteenth-century Cairo as both a quantitative and a qualitative, new phenomenon against the backdrop of a rapidly changing urban space. Structural factors such as the integration of Egypt's economy in the global market on an unequal base, the restructuring of household economies and family relations, the heightened economic vulnerability of previously autonomous, extended families, and women in particular, can explain why growing numbers of women depended on sex work to earn a living. The expansion of prostitution was also encouraged by the unprecedented demographic growth and increasing social stratification of Cairo; the demands of expats and a rising local middle class with greater purchasing power and new consumption styles; massive imperial military presence; mass tourism; and international migration. These elements constituted the background against which prostitution was assigned new critical social meanings by the elites, both local and foreign. It led me to reflect on the role of international migration within Cairo's commercial sex industry and the extent to which prostitution could imply the weakening of patriarchal relations of power. Thus sex workers' heteronormativity was partly defined by their being mobile and transient, both in the public space and across national frontiers, in a way that was perceived as problematic by patriarchal forces. Female migrant domestic labour tended to be seen as morally suspect, despite a certain overlap with sex work. If prostitution, as any type of income-generating activity, could potentially have had an emancipatory effect on women, provided they were free to accumulate and reinvest their earnings, in reality this seldom happened. Sex work, mainly performed by internal or international migrants, tended to be mediated by patriarchal forces, that is, men whose fortunes were intertwined with ‘their’ women's in a very complex web of reciprocal exploitation (as many sex workers' narratives concerning their pimps seem to confirm). Chapter 2 zooms in on the geography of sex work in modern Cairo. It analyses the Azbakiyyah, known for its red-light districts, as a heterotopian space essential to the production and reproduction of the imperial and national order. Chapter 3 looks at the actual material and discursive strategies – spatial segregation, labelling, quantification and medicalisation – deployed by both colonial and local authorities in order to turn women who engage in commercial sex into disciplined and docile objects of control. By looking at race as a constructed category and the main regulatory force in a colonial context, I demonstrate how foundational racial hierarchies were threatened, though ultimately reinforced, by the regulationist logic. In Chapter 4, I go beyond the nominalism of sex work regulation by taking a look at the actual organisation of the trade. An alternative reading of primary sources, especially a number of individual micro-histories, seems to challenge received stereotypes of racial superiority and narratives of female victimisation and coercion. This chapter also addresses the question of sex workers' agency and shows how women in the trade, although caught in a system of subordination, did manage to resist and circumvent unwanted state intervention and pimps' exploitation.

The emergence of mature biopolitical concerns led to the shift from regulationism to abolitionism. The precedent of abolitionist practices can be recognised in the Purification Campaign waged by colonial authorities in Cairo during World War I, with the aim of safeguarding public order and curtailing the rampant spread of venereal disease among Dominions and British troops garrisoned in the Egyptian capital. The relationship between colonial warfare prostitution and venereal contagion is the subject of Chapter 5. This analysis will allow me to elaborate on the delicate link between sex, morality and power, by focussing on the struggle between abolitionists from civil society and the pragmatic military authorities. Chapter 6 deals with colonial reformists' attempts to reform and reintegrate prostitutes into society by converting them to disciplined and reliable servants. Paying specific attention to foreign prostitutes and ‘fallen’ women in Cairo, this chapter explores the colonial dimension of Victorian social purity by showing how these specific categories of gendered, subaltern actors discursively played a very integral role in the preservation of besieged notions of colonisers' racial and civilisational superiority. Chapter 7 focusses on the abolitionist turn, and does so in two ways. It traces the evolution of the abolitionist option within an increasingly vibrant printing press industry, which became – in particular after the nationalist revolution of 1919 – a fundamental outlet for the diffusion of multiple and competing ideas about the ‘homogeneous’ and ‘authentic’ national community. Prostitution was used by nationalist leaders of different orientations to formulate a trenchant critique of Western imperialism and Egypt's political subordination, while delineating the contours of their much sought-after autonomous, national community in the local press. Here a number of themes were woven together: the fear of social anarchy; the growing discomfort with increased female mobility and irruption in the public space; the spread of venereal contagion and its related biopolitical risks; and the degeneration of the national community due to rampant immorality and debauchery. In the context of Egyptian nation-building, debates about prostitution represented a medium through which local notions of citizenship and cultural authenticity, mainly defined by religion, found expression. Public discourses on commercial sex, sexuality, gendered roles, marriage, the family and public health in the formally, newly founded, independent nation of Egypt were inseparable from the attempts to define its modernity and political maturity, and to legitimise local nationalists' hegemonic role. To attain these goals, a typical discursive strategy created the figure of the ‘national villain’, as a dense metaphor for the spreading of social malaise: for this purpose the book concludes with a discussion of the cases of the ‘King of the Underworld’, Ibrahim al-Gharbi, and of traffickers in women and children. Ever since 1932, when a special governmental commission officially pronounced itself in favour of abolition, Egyptian political elites and middle-class commentators have considered prostitution as intolerable. Egyptian nationalists' abolitionism was part and parcel of a global hyper-regulationist disciplinary project, which adopted a paternalistic humanitarian approach to heteronormativity as a way to ensure social order and stability.